Can’t we church people all get along?

UNITY: IT’S NOT A PIPE DREAM
When the early Church saw fit to enunciate “One” as one of the Church’s distinguishing characteristics, who could’ve imagined how difficult it would’ve been to preserve that fundamental feature? That Jesus prayed for His Church to be “one as we [He and the Father] are one” (Jn 17:23) in the hours before His arrest only heightens our sense of His deity: He knew well what would most plague the Church He was about to “obtain with His own blood” (Acts 20:28). Of what does our unity consist? Of what should it consist? Have a look here at the perspective of an Eastern Orthodox Christian regarding what our unity must be based upon.

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I know we are going to be talking about the church as “one” next week in class so I’ve been doing some thinking on it. The more I think about it and about where the church has come from, I can’t help but ask, “is God really pleased with the way the church is now, with our many denominations and differences?”. I can’t imagine that Augustine would be happy, well I don’t know…maybe he would recognize the need for some of the changes that have taken place. But his doctrines of grace and unity get a bit tangled when you consider the Donatist controversy and the Protestant reformation. Luther couldn’t have known that the church was about to split into a thousand pieces,right? Wasn’t he just thinking that the catholic church was going to reform and all would be united again? I do understand that the church has to be reformed and make changes at times, but is God ok with our “one” church being split like it is? Would He be more pleased with us if we were just His church, not a PCA church or a Baptist church? I understand that ultimately all denominations are one in the fact that our faith and hope for salvation is found in Christ alone and that when the invisible church comes to be we will for sure be one. That does tie us all together (hopefully). Let the pondering begin. Please add your thoughts!

Heard and noted

The Worldview of Work
There is another important component to being a Christian counterculture for the common good. Christians should be a people who integrate their faith with their work.
Culture is a set of shared practices, attitudes, values, and beliefs, which are rooted in common understandings of the "big questions"—where life comes from, what life means, who we are, and what is important enough to spend our time doing it in the years allotted to us. No one can live or do their work without some answers to such questions, and every set of answers shapes culture.
Most fields of work today are dominated by a very different set of answers from those of Christianity. But when many Christians enter a vocational field, they either seal off their faith and work like everyone else around them, or they spout Bible verses to their coworkers. We do not know very well how to persuade people of Christianity's answers by showing them the faith-based, worldview roots of everyone's work. We do not know how to equip our people to think out the implications of the gospel for art, business, government, journalism, entertainment, and scholarship. Developing humane, creative, and excellent business environments out of our understanding of the gospel can be part of this work. The embodiment of joy, hope, and truth in the arts is also part of this work. If Christians live in major cultural centers in great numbers, doing their work in an excellent but distinctive manner, that alone will produce a different kind of culture than the one in which we live now.
Jewish society sought spiritual power, while Greek society valued wisdom (1 Cor. 1:22-25). Each culture was dominated by a hope that Paul's preaching revealed to be an idol. Yet only in Christ, the true "wisdom of God" for Greeks and the true "power of God" for Jews, could their cultural storylines find a happy ending. The church envisioned in this article attracts people to Christianity by showing how Christ resolves our society's cultural problems and fulfills its cultural hopes. "For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength." --Tim Keller